Should you use Instagram for customer support?
Should you use Instagram for customer support?
Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes, but keep these things in mind →
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Back in 2013, an AdWeek article came out that stated that 80% of customer support enquiries went unanswered on social media. In the last 8 years since that article came out, while I’m sure that percentage has gone down, most brands are still not utilising Instagram to its fullest extent in this area.
Customers today are extremely demanding, especially on social. This partially stems from the fact that when a brand is present on social media, customers might view that account in a similar way they view their personal connections — and hence they expect an almost-immediate response when sent a message, especially in the case of something going wrong.
In this article, we’re going to dig into customer support and Instagram — why it’s extremely important in 2021 that brands address customer support actively on the platform, and how.
On speaking with a couple of social media managers and founders of brands, I learnt that it’s indeed a challenge – if customers see that their DMs aren’t answered promptly, they might take to the comments of photos to express their concerns. On the other hand, there are customers that directly comment on photos with their concerns, with the hopes that the company will respond.
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Reply to ALL comments warranting a reply
Vaer Watches does a great job in handling their comment section – promptly replying to people asking questions about their watches with responses that are definitely well thought-out instead of standard canned responses.
I believe this is the way to do it – make sure that your customers truly feel like they are being heard loud and clear. When a customer leaves a comment on your IG page, they expect a response. That’s why they commented in the first place.
In fact, Bain released an article in which they stated that customers that are engaged with companies on social end up spending 20-40% more money at that business than customers that are not engaged.
And the opportunity with comments is that if you do a great job in handling the comment, it’s publicly visible – so everyone can see how responsive you are, encouraging more people to comment and engage.
Address DMs and comments quickly
According to the Sproutsocial Index, the while the customer expectation is to receive a response within 4 hours, the average response time is around 10 hours.
This is usually because most brands don’t have dedicated customer support reps addressing queries on Instagram – they rely on the community managers/social media managers to monitor and reply to comments, and this may not be the best strategy.
Ideally, you would want to separate out the support-related DMs and have them addressed by someone that’s dedicated to addressing support queries. There are tools that allow you to do this — Ubu, for example, can filter out support DMs and send them to a tool like Gorgias to be addressed with the rest of your support queries.
Speak the language
Did you know that using emojis increases engagement by 48%? You want to make sure that you’re talking in the same language as your customers – on social media, there’s no place for the overly-formal style of communication that can sometimes be the case in customer support conversations.
Just make sure you do it well, do it authentically, and do it naturally, if you don’t want to be seen as cringe 😉
Build trust through your brand
By doing all of these things, you’re helping build trust for your brand. And when you build trust, customers are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong.
Track ALL your mentions and tags
Social media is THE place people go to when they have an overly positive or overly negative experience with a brand – they want to make sure that everyone knows what’s up.
It’s for this reason why it’s of paramount importance that you track everything – so just in case something’s gone wrong, you can address it immediately.
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In 2021, customers crave two-way communication on social media, particularly when they have questions and/or concerns. If this is done right, you can create some of the most loyal customer relationships for your brand.
Another approach would be to create a separate Instagram account for customer support, or just to interact more with your most loyal customers.
The possibilities are endless and the potential is enormous. You just need to step it up!
Ubu is a tool that helps you monitor, engage and grow your community through Inbox management (you can separate out support chats!), UGC tracking (track all of those tagged posts and stories to see what’s up) as well as comment management.
See you guys next week! 🚀